A comprehensive online archive of all things Genesis p-orridge,arguably one of the most important icons of alternative culture of the latter quarter of the 20th Century and beyond ...
the essays, interviews, music and magick that has given "CONTROL" headaches for 60-some years now.

*bear with me as i correct spelling and fix formatting on some of this older material!

One True Topi Tribe Facebook access point

Gen's upcoming events and Misc.upcoming projects...

GENS MISC. UPCOMING PROJECTS:Heartworm Press are publishing “Collected Lyrics and Poems of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge – Volume One 1961 to 1971. Later they will publish Gen's first novel, written in 1969, “Mrs. Askwith”. Other books will follow.

Responding to Kenneth Goldsmith’s epiphany on filesharing in The Wire 327, Henry Cow founder and ReR label boss Chris Cutler counts the cost of free music to those who make and distribute it

“Epiphany No 4: As a result, just like you, I stopped buying music”
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Wire 327

And where’s the harm? Surely uploading is just an extension of sharing with friends, an effective and commercially subversive way to promulgate the music you like? But friends are strangers now; a friend is anyone with a broadband connection. Search engines and P2P sites have turned the entire wired world into friends. And that changes things. You want the latest hit without paying; a bootleg of that Singapore show; some album that went missing in 1960 and was never re-pressed? No problem, a couple of clicks will get it because someone somewhere will have put it on a website and someone else will track it down for you. Of course that’s great. What kind of argument can you have with free?

Well, there’s always the second law of thermodynamics. Free always comes at a price. I don’t mean inconvenience to major record companies – though they’ve been doing all the shouting so far – but the likely and predictable repercussions for the music itself. What does free really mean outside of the purely personal effect of ‘I can get it without paying’ – a claim any mugger could make without scoring many argument points? What are the social, cultural and moral costs, the consequences? Sometimes it’s not only our attention span that has evaporated down to bug durations, but our future-directed thinking altogether. Certainly, as access has expanded, empathetic horizons have narrowed. We all apparently want better health, better education, better pension and social security provision, better transport networks, more police and safer streets – and lower taxes. We want to be paid for the work we do but, if possible, not pay for the work other people do; eat the seed corn now and let the future take care of itself. It’s a model inherited from politicians and careless corporations. So I’m afraid, in my book, the ‘all music should be free’ argument is just an infinitesimal fleck in the onward progress of this idiot wave.

Making a recording is not cost-free or work-free; it’s expensive. And those costs can only be recovered through sales. No sales, or sales so low that costs are not recouped, mean artists are forced either to cut the costs next time (with inevitable negative consequences for quality) or not to record so much – or at all. Along with a lot of dross, good music is lost this way, especially at the margins, where the most innovative work is already barely paying its way. In my own field, I know how many musical projects never leave the notebook because of problems with the pocket book.

Perhaps a climate of official indifference and deprivation makes for healthy art? As Sun Ra said, “Resist me, make me strong.” Certainly some – the most driven – will produce one way or another: Ives, Partch and Nancarrow, overlooked in their lifetimes, all wrote and rewrote against the future; Ra recorded and released The Arkestra’s work on his own label; numerous marginal groups, like Thinking Plague, do day jobs and produce what music they can, when they can. And since they will do it anyway, why pay them? The same argument lies behind the cynical underpayment of nurses and carers. Let’s face it, money spent on virtue is money wasted; the more socially useless labour is, the more it attracts reward – hence the phone number salaries of multinational CEOs whose only achievement is profits, and the vast incomes of investors whose virtue is to be already rich.

In a healthy and plural culture, independent funding for independent artists remains the main guarantee of innovative work. And that means the ability, somehow, for musicians to earn a living from what they do. Which is why festivals, performance spaces and independent record companies are so essential: they hold the line. Without concerts or records the equation runs: No income = day job = less art + more compromise. That is why the fate of independent labels matters and why Napster and all similar technologies matter – in spite of the fact that the level of the debate so far has consisted essentially of defiant manifestos legitimising the beleaguered Davids of free posting and the whining of misunderstood Goliaths in the music industry. Both polemics, I think, radically miss the point.

Data 1: The Artist

There are at least three Henry Cow fans who would like the group to reform and record again. They would naturally expect us to take the time – and spend the money – to do the job properly. And today, ‘properly’ means six to eight months of composition and rehearsal and something in the region of £9000 in travel, living and recording costs (the last International Federation of the Phonographic Industry report averaged the industry recording budget for a new group at £20,000). There are no shortcuts, especially for a group that still uses technically demanding instruments, plays in real time and wants to use the studio as a proper instrument. Laptop plus ProTools is cheaper, but it supports only a narrow genre of music. To recover that £9000, the group would have to be confident of selling at least 3500 copies of a CD or 1000-plus paid downloads – and that’s before the musicians or composers receive anything at all.

Data 2: The Label

If ReR lost 15 per cent of its sales to free downloads, that would pretty much wipe us out, but in the short term, the 15 per cent of listeners who didn’t pay would benefit, because the music would be free – although, of course, the service provider, the telephone company and the rest of the intermediaries who contribute nothing to the music would still get paid. In the longer term, however, insolvency would force the label to fold or change its release policy. Perhaps no one would be that bothered. Perhaps they assume that someone will always carry on releasing sidestream music, and some unknown friend or other will always carry on uploading it so that the free concert could go on forever. But it won’t. ReR is already one of very few survivors in a shrinking field, and if we go down, there’s no guarantee that anyone else will want to step into our shoes. Equation two: 15 per cent of free downloads = non-viability of marginal labels = less diversity.

Diversity

You may not care for ReR or the music it has nurtured, but you can substitute for it any number of other independent labels that support any number of other marginal musics – we are all equally damaged by the strange and thoughtless culture of indiscriminate uploading. Think of it as an ecological issue, a question of diversity for the sake of diversity. Forget the good guys/bad guys story, it’s just a question of whether we want a static, monocultural, factory farm environment or a diverse, plural, interconnected and evolving one. If the latter, we have to start thinking beyond immediate personal convenience.

Where is honour? We pay the plumber, the electrician, the VAT inspector; we pay the service provider and the telephone company, so why so careless of the musician and the struggling label? If you plant a garden and bring its fruits to term – and your friends dig it up in the night to feed themselves, perhaps praising you for your industry – and then sit back in the expectation of another year of gardening to sustain them through the following year, would you continue to dig and delve? Do vegetables really want to be free?

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a man/woman of many faces, both literally and figuratively. The pandrogynous father/mother of industrial music, Genesis was a founding member of both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. A lot of people would be uneasy with standing in a room with an individual who’s had thousands of dollars of surgery to look like his/her deceased better half (Lady Jaye), but we know better. VICE Fashion Editor Annette Lamothe-Ramos recently spent a day hanging out with Gen for an article in the magazine to find out what she’s really like behind her implanted C cups and gold grill. VBS documented their time together for this episode of From the Pages of VICE… in which they go shopping for biker patches, bear heads, motorcycle boots, and become great friends within the span of a day.

See the rest at VBS.TV: Shopping with Genesis P-Orridge - From The Pages of Vice | VBS.TV

“We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, within our constructed behavior patterns, so vulnerable to Control” – Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

***
Toward the beginning of the semester when we first started discussing Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence and process ontology, I sensed some resonance between Deleuze and a collective of artists whose work has been important to my own understanding of music and the possibilities it can hold– Throbbing Gristle. I decided to write my final paper on Throbbing Gristle after finding an essay relating them to Deleuze (explained further on), and figured I’d try to work out some of my ideas on the blog before I present my topic (I’ll play some of the videos I include here in class, but feel free to take a listen if you are unfamiliar with TG).

Formed in the mid-1970s and consisting of members of the performance art group COUM Transmissions (infamously described by a British politician as “wreckers of civilization”), Throbbing Gristle approached music as a way to evolve and disseminate their own ideas of how sound can work on pure affect and lead toward a de-subjectification of their listeners’ understanding of control systems. Credited with developing the genre of Industrial music, TG worked with home-built electronics, synthesizers, various home-built effects units, found sounds, processed noise, and lyrics using the cut-up technique developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin to create some of the most intense and influential records of the 1970′s.

Interestingly, Throbbing Gristle created most of their tracks in a live setting, improvising and working off one another. Similarly, lyrics were either developed live on stage by vocalist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, or free-associated as a group and then cut-up and reassambled. As P-Orridge says,

“Our sound is describing our collective and individual emotions and visions. And the sound that came from what we thought and saw… was second. Because that sound is completely inseparable from the way we felt at any given moment, which is why we did so much live, and why so much happened live. Whatever happened live was exactly what was going through us all at that time… And you can’t imitate that or mimic it or copy it” (Re/Search Magazine).

TG were always focused on the process of creation and the ways their own percepts and affects influenced their work. Though influenced by the urban-industrial landscape of London, TG’s work was not a representation of that world, but rather an active, creative process that sought to transform and rethink the world around them, an idea which resonates with Deleuze’s own interest in how an artists’ engagement with an artwork can enact an immanent philosophy.

Similarly, as they considered themselves to be non-musicians, TG’s artistic mission was more about pushing the limits of sound and to advance a philosophy that rejected control by assembling and re-contextualizing the detritus and unsavory elements of modernity; external forces such as industrial noise, serial killers, Nazi propaganda, Christian extremism and cult phenomena, and all sorts of violent and “taboo” sex found its way into their work. As they bluntly put it on one of their LPs, TG sought “Entertainment Through Pain,” a kind of deterritorialization of the harmonics found in popular music in order to elicit an affectual response.

While one could make the argument that TG worked solely in shock aesthetics (and trust me, many have, and even more have unsuccessfully imitated it), this would ignore the core of their intent: that by working with affective elements in their art (noise, intense frequencies, graphic imagery), they could instigate a break in their listeners’ habituated realities that have been ingrained by powers that seek to dominate and control us. Michael Goddard writes, “by simulating these cult phenomena, TG were able to examine the demonic mechanisms by which individuals are subjugated and turned into a pliable mass by organizations of sound and language, with a view to reversing these processes into a process of deconditioning… [making] reference to entirely immanent processes of desubjectification and subjectification” (Goddard 166). TG’s interest in dark subject matter was partly a reflection of the world they sensed; however, this material also serves to remind listeners how these forces are not outside our world, but rather a part of the world in which we are complicit. Indeed, “shock was used in a tactical way, not to immediately actualize anomalous phenomena by representing them but to tap their unactualized virtual forces by maintaining them in virtuality” (Goddard 169).

Virtuality helps to understand TG’s aesthetic, for they remained interested in leaving their work open-ended and in the realm of possibility and potential: the potential for unexpected relations, the potential for change, the potential for new ideas to emerge, transform, and proliferate. This virtuality is best seen in their formless and improvised live performances, their use of home-built electronics to create and manipulate unknown and unpredictable sounds, and their lyrical structures based on cut-up and improvisation. To me, this kind of virtuality lends itself to a comparison to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the smooth and striated, in that they aimed to deterritorialize ideas about how popular music could be conceived, executed, and understood.

This interest is taken one step further in Throbbing Gristle’s experimentation in undermining expectations, leaving room for the band to explore, evolve, and remind their audience that the function of art is to create new modes of expression to stimulate thought. For example, they released their D.o.A. album of harsh, industrial noise followed immediately after by the “United” single, a song that can best be described as a sappy Abba-inspired love song. Similarly, the cover of their 20 Jazz Funk Greats LP belies the content on the album; the image of the band standing on a cliffside wearing leisure suits and cheery smiles on a sunny day was deliberately used to disorient and disrupt expectations, as well as to raise questions about how the media/advertisers package products to implore us to buy without thinking.

By seemingly working within the realm of pop consumer culture through pop tracks like “United” or “Hot on the Heels of Love” or by reinventing their image on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle resisted being pigeon-holed (anything is possible in the world of TG) and raised important questions about how different images and sounds work upon our habituated ideas. Similarly, by creating assemblages of noise, ambient texture, rhythm, synthesizers, found sound, and lyrics referencing the occult, violence, and other ‘dirty’ things, TG created affectual and haptic sonic environments that strove for unexpected connections and an engagement with a plane of immanence with no recourse to power structures that seek to delimit and control our becomings with the world (and all its gory details).

There is a lot here to figure out, but my main interest in investigating Throbbing Gristle vis-a-vis Deleuze came from Michael Goddard’s essay “Sonic and Cultural Noise as Production of the New: The Industrial Music Media Ecology of Throbbing Gristle,” in which he relates the art/music practices of TG to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that the production of the new is always possible in art, philosophy, and science. While Goddard raises many interesting points in his essay, I would like to go one step further by showing how Throbbing Gristle’s music-making and aesthetic practices relate to a wholly Deleuzean philosophy of immanence and process ontology based on their ideas of deterritorialization, the rhizome, affects and precepts, the refrain, and the smooth and striated. Particularly in connection to Deleuze’s ideas concerning control societies and the “new forms of resistance” that must be created to fight them, Throbbing Gristle’s sense of the world (however dark or unpleasant TG’s sense may be) rejects universals and insists on change and becoming through a rethinking of the systems of control that delimit dynamic engagement and continual becoming. Ultimately, TG created some really powerful (and endlessly influential) music that works so well because it utilizes a sonic palette that is entirely original, varied, and disorienting (or should I say deterritorializing?), while also forging connections with the world and its potential for change.

Last year a former member of the Process Church of the Final Judgement stepped forward and produced a book called "Love, Sex, Fear, Death" that attempted to set the record straight about the much maligned and mysterious group. Though his own words, as well as original source material and contributions from other writers, he managed to shed light on the very real problems of psychological manipulation and exploitation that the plagued the group, while simultaneously dismissing the erroneous claims of murder, animal sacrifice, and child abuse that they have been accused of. One of the writers that contributed to that book was Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the founder of Thee Temple ovPsychick Youth, and lead singer of Psychick TV.

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth with its ever present symbol and use of uniforms, was partly modeled on the Process Church and eventually ran into its own issues of false accusations and vilification. It is good timing than that Genesis would release a new expanded version of Thee Psychic Bible, which contains numerous essays and documents from TOPY, commentary from Genesis and others, and some very interesting photographic art pieces throughout the book.

Now, I should say here that while I like some of Psychic TV's pop pieces like Godstar, Roman P, and their covers of Eve ov Destruction and Good Vibrations, I have never been a big fan of the music of Psychic TV over all, or for that matter the genre of industrial music. On top of that I tend not to like movements that are very self-consciously "too cool for school", which TOPY most assuredly was. Throw in my love hate relationship with Chaos Magic and Aliester Crowley, two of the biggest influences on the magic of TOPY, and you can understand that when Behutet sent me a copy of Thee Psychick Bible to review, I was prepared to give it a resounding and dismissive "meh".

I am happy and surprised that my expectations were entirely wrong. It seems that I let the few American members of TOPY that I knew personally color my opinion of the overall work. The book is quite simply brilliant.

Just like "Love, Sex, Fear, Death", this book tells the story of a magical/spiritual group that was as important to the 1980s as the Process was to the 1960's and 70's. It gives inside accounts of the raves and rituals that TOPY orchestrated, and tells the now infamous story of how Genesis was accused on trumped up charges and had to move to the US to avoid arrest in the UK. It also detailed the various social issues that TOPY worked on, including starting a soup kitchen in Nepal, and working towards the closure of a Dolphin Aquarium. Working for animal rights being yet another parallel with the Process which eventually became the Best Friends Animal Society.

This book however, is much more than the history of a Temple. In terms of philosophy, spiritual transmission, and practical magic, there is a lot here for the modern magician to chew on.

Though I had known about the practice of TOPY members making sigils with bodily fluidson the 23rd of each month and sending to a central location to be gathered, I never read the full philosophy behind it. The discussion of the "Sigil of Three Fluids" is probably the best explanations of sigil magic I have ever seen. The explanation of how each fluid relates to a portion of the brain puts a unique spin on a topic that has been done to death over the last 25 years.

The whole chapter on intuitive magic is worth its weight in gold. Here we have everything good about Chaos Magic: the streamlining, the shamanic method, the personalization, the use of modern technology, etc with none of the sillyness about belief shifting or invoking cartoon characters as gods. Indeed Genesis makes a point that I have often made myself, that belief is not only not necessary for magic, but can be the enemy of initiation. The sections on sex magic, the use of magical links (splinters), cut up methods, and other techniques is all top notch sorcery.

Most important are probably the three TOPY books collected in one place:

Thee Grey Book, the first TOPY text that one is introduced to, shows the youthful exuberance of the people who were involved in TOPY at its beginning. For as revolutionary as it may or may not have been at the time, it seems kind of "cute" in nostalgic sort of way now.

Thee Black Book takes things to a new level and gets quite serious about getting down to the business of undertaking the process of transforming the individual.

Thee Green Book, the final TOPY text, is a spiritual work that is on par with the Book of the Law, Liber Pene Penumbra, the Book of the Spider, and other important cornerstone texts. The talk of Ultraterrestrials may be dismissed by some, but whether you believe in them as actual beings or a metaphor for what we are doing to ourselves, the text is dripping with truth and is a wonderful call to action.

Throughout the book there is loads of stories from Genesis's life which explains some of the background of his writings and music. Want to know about the obsession with Brian Jones as Godstar? The story is in here. Want some insight into Genesis's work in the field of pandrogeny and transgenderism? The beginning is here, and I think it will be necessary reading for when he gives the topic a full treatment including his Ketemine explorations. To be clear, there are no plans for this that I know of, I am just assuming that it is in the pipe.

The book is 544 pages with fairly small type. There is a LOT to digest here. All of it is good stuff. If you were into Psychic TV and TOPY than you obviously will want this book. If you, like me, never really gave it much thought when they were active, you should pick it up to see what you missed out on.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Write up on the audio archives from http://www.station9452.com..June 22th-26th i will be visiting Genesis, transferring more cassettes and rarities to digital for the Audio archive!
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May 18, 2011,

P-Orridge With Everything

Genesis P-Orridge - 2011

You probably already know who Genesis P-Orridge is; if you don’t, just think to yourself, “industrial music,” and then think, “Genesis P-Orridge invented it,” and you will be pretty close to the truth.

I am not going to give you a history lesson. Instead I’m going to give you some news, and if you are already a fan of GPO, then this is going to be really, REALLY good news.

Unreleased recordings and hard to find rarities are being made available via Bandcamp, and with the prices of several recordings starting at just 25 cents, it looks like affordability won’t be an issue.

If you are a fan of GPO, these recordings are not to be missed. The content ranges from hilarious to hypnotic to stunning, and the spoken word performance from the Captain Beefheart Symposium in NYC on April 8, 2011 is a particularly astonishing example of why some people just cannot get enough P-orridge.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Very excited to tell you about this project Gen and I have been working to set up for some time now.
THE GENESIS P-ORRIDGE AUDIO ARCHIVE.http://theearchive.bandcamp.com/

JUNE 22-26 I shall be visiting Gen, going thru H/ir archives, HUNDREDS of cassette tapes, spoken word, live shows, symposium speeches. For now, check out the site, let us know what else you would like to see there!

CORRECTION:-This text on COUM Transmissions compounds an often re-iterated misconception about COUM Transmissions.

For the sake of Astorical accuracy only, we add this correction.

COUM Transmissions was received as a series of visions by Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge in Shrewsbury, Shropshire late Summer of 1969. Genesis founded COUM Transmissions as an art project alone. There were NO co-founders. He had never met, nor heard of Christine Carol Newby (later Christened Cosmosis by Genesis) at that time. The original members of COUM Transmissions were G P-O and John Jesus Shapeero. Later on Dr Timothy poston, Ian "Spydee" Evetts, Peter "Pinglewad" Winstanley all became members. Cosey began her connection with COUM Transmissions performances around 1971-72. She had however, always supported Genesis and COUM both conceptually as a member of the "Coumunity" at the HoHo Funhouse and functionally creating costumes and props. After beginning to also take part in street actions and arts festival performances she grew to add a unique and powerful element and became an integral aspect of the ever more intimate and extreme actions of COUM Transmissions. A perfect foil in the later explorations of sexuality, gender and stereotypes.

Handbill for COUM Transmissions' 'Prostitution' exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, October 1976

Courtesy Tate Archive

Lizzie Carey-Thomas on COUM Transmissions

“Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of society. These people are the wreckers of civilisation,” wrote Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn in the Daily Mail on 19 October 1976. The subject of his tirade was the performance-art group COUM Transmissions and its recently opened, now infamous exhibition ‘Prostitution’ at the ICA, London. COUM, formed in Hull in 1969 by Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, had begun life as a band, but gained notoriety throughout the early 1970s for its taboo-breaking direct “actions”. Its founders’ antagonistic approach often brought them into conflict with the law, the most well-documented of which was P-Orridge’s indecent postcard trial of April 1976. Hijacking the trial as an art event under the title ‘G.P.O v. G-P.O’, complete with invitation cards, he subsequently announced: “What E [sic] am interested in now is that point where Art meets Life and fuses, dispersing art and enhancing life.”

While ‘Prostitution’ ran for only eight days at the ICA, it received a hostile and widespread reaction from the national press, who saw its contents as a deliberate assault on the moral and artistic values of the time. Alongside photographs of COUM performances and related press cuttings (including those levelled at the show), the exhibition included used tampons sculptures, props from past “actions” and framed pages of pornographic magazines from Tutti’s modelling career, available upon request.

Nineteen seventy-six had been a difficult year for contemporary art in Britain, which found itself facing an increasingly sceptical press during a period of all-time economic lows. Since the furore over Tate’s purchase of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (the “Tate Bricks”) in February, public subsidy of the arts had been forensically examined, and some critics were quick to see ‘Prostitution’ as further evidence of waning standards and a threat to societal values. In a typically agile move, the show was to be both the culmination and death of COUM’s art-related activities – the duo relaunched themselves at the opening as industrial band Throbbing Gristle, abandoning the art establishment altogether.

- Archive material on COUM Transmissions and 'Prostitution' has been selected from the Genesis P-Orridge archive held at Tate and a private collection.

“Eva Adolf Braun Hitler” was a Short film created By Gen circa 1996.
(which proposed that Eva Braun and the famous dictator are the same person and have been living in a basement in Williamsburg NY since WW2 !),

"The official version of the end of the Second World War is of course completely inaccurate. Adolf Hitler actually murdered Eva Braun and then escaped in her drag when the Russians were coming. In all the confusion they just burned somebody else’s body next to hers. Adolf escaped and eventually, via various routes, got to America and is now living as a janitor in an old industrial building in the Midwest. However, through the guilt of having murdered the love of his life, and all the trauma of being who he is/was, he has become completely possessed by Eva. So he lives now as Eva Adolf Braun Hitler in this basement, in this boiler room. So that’s the basic story. She’s completely and utterly demented and suffering in hell. Yet she’s almost prudishly politically correct about gender issues. Ha, of all things!"

Notes from 2009 "Interview" article.Genesis This is Eva Adolf Braun Hitler, a character I invented. This was in New York City in 1996, for a night out at Jackie 60. We actually grew that mustache, just for one night out. Jaye also filmed me as this character for a series of short films I made for Pigface, an industrial music super-group I was in.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Notes straight From Gen on the Recording of the next PTV 12" vinyl release earlier this week...

PTV3 (Jess on keyboards/Jeff "Bunsen" Berner on guitars/ Morrison Edley on drums/ Alice Genese on Bass/ Gen on vocals)
Mother Sky c/w Alien Sky
Both came out great...Alien Sky is a totally new song. Number 2 in the ALIEN series.
These will be blue and white vinyl 12"

June 22-26th I will be visiting Gen to begin work on and audio archive project Going thru Hundreds of cassettes to convery and upload for digital downloads.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge lives in a section of Manhattan tucked below the Williamsburg Bridge and fairly far east towards the river. She’s listed as “G. P-Orridge” on the buzzer in the lobby, and then she’s just five or six flights up in a building filled with mostly older people and enough observant Jews that they turn the working elevators off on Friday nights to observe the rules of the Sabbath. It’s a funny place for her to be, a normal, average New York building for a philosopher Queen whose very resistance to anything bland or boring has made her a hero to so many people. She seems to love it, though, and it was in that comfortable space that she opened up to us about her life, her philosophy and a new collaboration with streetwear brand Mishka that’s allowed her to spread her ideas even farther than they’ve been before.

If you don’t know much about Genesis, there’s too much to explain in one blog post, so before watching our interview with her, read our recent article from F73 to get a sense of who she is.
(continues below)

New Testament: Genesis P-Orridge and Mishka Outfit the Insurrection

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is not famous to the mainstream, but she is a superstar to many. A founding member of the world’s first industrial band, Throbbing Gristle, Genesis emerged from that original rebellion to form the group Psychic TV, and created around it a loose collective of like-minded people called Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth. TOPY’s mission was to be a positive force through practicing ritual magic and D.I.Y. community building. Genesis created the symmetric symbol of the Psychic Cross to stand as an emblem of their tribe’s unity.

Collectivity has been Genesis’ life’s work, and it was something she shared intimately with her late wife, Lady Jaye. Through the practice of “pandrogony,” Genesis and Lady Jaye ritualistically became one by wearing the same things, referring to themselves as “we,” (which Genesis still does) and even surgically altering their bodies to look similar. Four years after Lady Jaye’s death, Genesis still believes in their bond and in their commitment to the community. A brand new collaboration with New York brand Mishka on a line of clothes bearing the Psychic Cross is just a new phase in Genesis’ goal of spreading the communal gospel. Click through to read all of Genesis’ thoughts and then watch our video interview with her.

Genesis P-Orridge: We hadn’t heard of Mishka when our manager Ryan brought us the idea of collaborating with them, but we agreed to meet. They were informed, they wanted to tell the world at large about what we do. We didn’t realize that people in streetwear would even know about us, let alone our ideas, and it was the ideas that they were really supportive of. We want this to be a way of disseminating ideas. People can go buy our clothes with the Psychic Cross logo and go home and look up what it means.

We had never even cared about clothes until Lady Jaye got us into it. Most of the fun’s gone out of it when it’s not the two of you dressing up. You know, girls together getting dressed up can be really good fun. We were the same size, same shoe size, too. Lady Jaye was the stylist. We’d wear the same outfits. She had a Christian Dior leather coat that went down to the ground, the most amount of leather we’d ever seen. All black, fitted at the top, and then it went out like a ball gown. When we worked as a dominatrix, one of Lady Jaye’s clients bought her that, so even though it was probably expensive, no cash went from our account to pay for it.

She made clothes fun that way, she introduced me to the idea that fashion could be fun. You didn’t have to become obsessed with values. Clothes were just part of it. Her favorite phrase was “Fuck ’em all.” Clothes became part of our idea that you could look like or be whoever you want.

For the Mishka project, we were thinking about strategy, about being a tribe that can recognize each other by certain symbols and dress codes. You could be anywhere in the world and see the Psychic Cross and think that a person is going to be similar enough to you to help you out, tell you where to go, or maybe let you spend the night. We were thinking that if this whole economy collapses in the next ten years, any right wing extremist groups or Hell’s Angels are going to be well prepared because they’re unified. They have symbols, a language. So why not take those structures and do something positive? Fashion is propaganda, like waving a flag.

Genesis p-orridge was invited to contribute a chapter to a book on the Process church, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie, edited by Adam Parfrey, published by Feral House. Genesis allowed Behutet magazine to print the portions of h/ir original submitted piece before it was edited for the Love Sex Fear Death release. Following is a section from the original submission focusing on Nepal.

...I had always been drawn to Tibetan Buddihism from around 9 years old when i read "seven years in Tibet" by Heinrich Harrer whilst sick and off school. Later, I acquired a Tibetian thighbone trumpet, an amazing singing bowl and other instruments that were played on "Themes one",the record that accompanied "Force the hand of chance" by Psychic tv in 1983. Continuing my search for comprehension of life, the universe, nonsensus reality, and the mystery of conscious, but mortal, life I began visiting Samye Ling Tibetian Monastery with my family. One time Lama Yeshe, the retreat master, suggested Forcefully that I go to Nepal. He gave us the contact information for their monastery there. We had a childrens clothers drive with TOPY and Psychic Tv fans and off we went. We used our savings to finance the soup kitchen.After a few days one of the monks asked me to become the mentor of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's son! For the next months i would almost daily visit the monestary and take Chogyam's son on "field" trips to Shiva temples and other compartive religous sites. We made quite a sight, mein all black leather and him in orange and saffron robes. The intersection s and similarities between my TOPY experience and the Process seem significant in some ethereal manner. It is pointless to speculate upon them....

Monday, May 9, 2011

You want to know why that happened? The thing that’s ironic is we were in Katmandu using our PTV royalties—from “Godstar”, funnily enough—we felt guilty about making money [laughs]. So we went there through these Tibetan Buddhist monks we knew, and we financed a soup kitchen all through the winter, for the refugees from Tibet, and lepers and beggars and little children that were orphans. We fed them three times a day—sometimes 3 or 400 people. We got all our fans to send clothing, so they could keep warm. And it was while we were doing that we were told we were the most evil people in Britain and couldn’t come back [laughs].

I was sitting on the bed thinking, what do I do now? And my eyes caught this envelope with all these old letters in it. As we were leaving the house to go away, I just put all the mail in an envelope and put it in a bag. So I started going through [it] ’cause I was kind of in shock, and there’s one there from Michael Horowitz. So we open it, and inside there’s a postcard, which says: “We were at the gig at Dingwall’s, and it was the most psychedelic thing we’ve seen since the Acid Tests in 1966. If you ever need a refuge, call this number.” We went back into the town, because there was only one place you could phone outside, phoned up Michael and said we need a refuge, me and the kids. And he goes, “Okay, can you get to San Francisco? If you can get here, we’ll pick you up, you can stay with us.” Then I rang Wax Trax, and said, “I need tickets for me and the kids, one way to America, could you front the money?” They said okay. So that’s how we got here. And Michael Horowitz is the person who hid Timothy Leary’s archive when he was in jail, and also is Winona Ryder’s dad.

When [Psychic TV] did “I.C. Water,” the one about Ian Curtis, we painted the wall gray, put the microphone right against the wall, and I stood like this and faced this gray wall for about an hour, then said, I’m ready, and then sang it straight down on tape. And that was it—one take

This is an important piece of music history that truly belongs in a museum!

The sound that created an entire genre of music!

This was designed by Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle. One was given to each member of Throbbing Gristle and signed by all Four! This one is the personal Gristleizer belonging to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge! Although it is killing me to sell it, I am selling it for her. The description below was written by Genesis:

VERY RARE “GRISTLEIZER” SIGNED BY ALL THROBBING GRISTLE. INDUSTRIAL MUSIC EFFECTS BOX.

This “Gristleizer” is one of only four in the world signed by all four members of Throbbing Gristle. This effects box is the new edition created from Chris Carter’s original design. It is the key secret effect that gave early TG their unique sound. This one is being sold on behalf of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Signed by Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Sleazy Peter Christopherson and Genesis. There can never be another one created due to the tragic death of Sleazy. This is the actual one used by Genesis in regrouped TG concerts; Psychic TV concerts; Thee Majesty concerts and in violin duets with Tony Conrad. In full working order.

Monday, May 2, 2011

original info posting...
APRIL 8th GARY LUCAS who composed and played with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band has organized a TRIBUTE NIGHT. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge will contribute a spoken word performance of CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (Don Van Vliet) lyrics and poems, perhaps in collaboration with other artists there...at the KNITTING FACTORY, New York. Check their site for further details or visit Gary Lucas' site. He is one of the world's most innovative and technical guitarists ever! You'd HAVE to be to play with Beefheart and hold your own writing music with him.